It is useful for vendors who sell items through the Internet to be able to compile sophisticated marketing data that indicates users' interest in the vendors' Web pages. Interest in a particular page may be determined by counting the number of “hits” on that page (i.e., the number of times the page is accessed) or by combining a count of the number of hits with data indicative of the amount of time users spend viewing the page. The number of hits for a page and the amount of time spent by users viewing a page are both determinable using conventional techniques.
Although measurement of users' interest in each of a vendor's pages is useful, additional useful information may be obtained by correlating these measurements on a per user basis. Thus, a vendor may learn that a first type of user that is interested in page A is also usually interested in page B, while a second type of user that is interested in page C is also usually interested in page D. Such information allows the vendor to customize his Web pages on the fly for each user so that a user that initially selects particular pages is presented with the opportunity to select more of the type of pages in which that user is expected to be interested.
However, in many instances, a user accessing the Internet jumps from server to server. Unless different vendors on different servers agree to cooperate, it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, for a first vendor on a first server to know that a user who accessed a particular one of the first vendor's pages also accessed a particular page of a second vendor on a second server. In addition, there is no built in mechanism on the Internet for globally identifying users so that vendors on different servers can share such information. Also, even in instances where a group of cooperating vendors have adopted a cross-server user identification scheme that globally identifies the users to the vendors, it is questionable whether such schemes violate users' privacy since each of the participating vendors is exchanging information about users that the users might not want to be shared. Moreover, such limited cooperative efforts at cross-server identification generally employs a single identifier for each user. However, cross-server identification schemes that employ a single identifier have disadvantages. For example, should one of the vendors stop collaborating with the others, such as because of an organizational or business change, issues of ownership and access to information tied to a shared identifier can arise.
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide a distributed identification scheme which allows individual servers to control their own local identification scheme and to collaborate with other servers at its manager's discretion to allow a user to access multiple servers in an enterprise network without potentially violating the privacy of the user.